Creating Your Personal Carbon Reduction Plan, Part 3 of 3

Personal Life Actions that Work

Apr 23, 2022

Once you have optimized your job for carbon reduction (part 1) and electrified your life with renewable electricity (part 2), how can you continue the momentum? I outline it here. However, a word of caution: Many people start with these items because they are easy. Okay, go ahead and do the easy things. I put these in part 3, however, because they are not nearly as impactful as the actions I described in Parts 1 and 2. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking we are having a big impact when we have only done the small, easy things.

Making Stuff at Home

Transportation is one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gasses, but most of us think about transportation in terms of our cars and how we get to the store. At least as big is the transportation network that gets everything in the store to the store—food, clothing, hardware, garden supplies, and virtually everything else we need for contemporary life. Trucks, trains, airplanes, ships—all of them adding to the carbon footprint of anything you buy in a store or, for that matter, online.

Unless you have a job addressing those logistics needs, we can’t directly affect how the transportation business works. But we can affect how much of it we need to use. This is where home production comes in—for those who are interested or skilled, making your own can be an additional carbon footprint reduction strategy.

As mentioned in Part 2, the number one contribution is to make your own electricity on your rooftop if you can. In virtually every state, it is less expensive to generate electricity from your own rooftop than it is to buy it from the utility. There will be a substantial investment, but even with financing costs, rooftop solar is almost always less expensive and will eliminate greenhouse gasses from the operation of your home or building. You will need to find a way to invest in this, but you do not need any skill to produce the electricity. Hired experts do the installation.

New technology is enabling a lot more home production as well. The making of music, videos, photos, writing, and digital art are all part of this trend. Laser printers enable printing of brochures and flyers in ways that were not possible a couple decades ago. The next generation of these at-home production tools are going to include 3D printing of personal household items, counter-top home food production, and similar capabilities.

Today, home production also relies on basic skills like gardening, sewing, auto repair, woodworking. You can grow some of your own food, for example, and for each bit of food you grow, there is no need for that to be shipped to the store where you would otherwise buy it. The same could be said for home production of clothing or furniture.

In the near future, home production will rely on new enabling technologies like 3D printing. Most of us already have a computer and phone, both of which are great home production tools if you create digital products or services. Be ready to adopt new production technology when it becomes available because it will greatly expand your capabilities.

At-home production can impact your carbon foot print, but you do not have to live with less to achieve your carbon goals. You don’t have to make your life smaller and less satisfying. Simply transform those parts that make the biggest impact while making your life better.

Diet—Not What, But Where

You can also reduce your carbon footprint based on food choices and diet, but one should be thoughtful about this. Many people provide guidance on carbon footprint and end up recommending veganism as a carbon footprint reduction strategy. According to the EPA, however, agriculture only accounts for 10% of US greenhouse gas emissions, and only a portion of that is from livestock. In other words, even if the entire country became vegan—an unlikely scenario—the total reduction would only be 3% or so. The impact on the size of your personal carbon footprint is also likely to be quite small.

This is not to say that food doesn’t matter—it does. With transportation (29%), electricity generation (25%), and industry (23%) accounting for over three-quarters of US greenhouse gas emissions, where you get your food is far more important than the actuality of what you eat. In other words, beef from a local farm that is butchered locally is far different, from a carbon perspective, than beef in a feedlot-raised, slaughter-house processed, food factory processed, frozen and shipped beef patty that ends up in your bag from a fast food restaurant. A vegan jar of palm hearts—with trees taken from tropical areas, processed in industrialized facilities, shipped from as far away as Indonesia, and resulting in a jar you need to recycle—may have far more carbon footprint than a hunk of Colby cheese produced in your own state. Less extreme, but also likely, is that an egg from down the road carries less carbon footprint than the head of lettuce you buy at the store, which is shipped in from California’s central valley. Veganism is not an automatic winner as far as carbon footprint goes.

Hence, the person concerned about carbon footprint in their diet should evaluate their diet to understand its sources. Where does their food originate? The more you can remove transportation, processing, shipping (especially refrigerated shipping), and cold storage from your individual food chain, the more impact you will have reducing your carbon footprint. The bigger benefit is to stay outside the system, rather than to change what you eat.

Policy Advocacy—Helping Others Do the Right Thing

In 2021, I was impressed as many people were with the strong outpouring of energy and commitment from youth who demonstrated in Glasgow during the international climate summit. They were there in large numbers and came from around the world to try to push the negotiators to do the right thing and fix climate change.

The problem with this and other protests is its focus on what we are against. It is fine to be against producing more natural gas, but then you need an answer for how people heat their homes. We can be against burning coal, but then we need to push solutions for generating electricity. The world as we know it, after all, can’t live without energy.

More importantly, we have seen the climate agenda get hijacked by other agendas, as activist agendas often do. A good example is the policy priorities put forward by the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, which you can find here. There are fifteen “priorities” and they address population control, changing the monetary system, income inequality, resource distribution, the workday, banking regulations, and much more. But not one single word about not burning fossil fuels. Not one word about carbon emissions.

So, the question is: What’s the agenda? I would propose that it is not climate change. CASSE has a bigger agenda, much of which has nothing to do with climate change. I’m not picking on CASSE here, but using them to point out, once again, that we need to understand what we are advocating if we are going to be effective. What we need right now, more than anything else, is meaningful, effective change that reduces carbon emissions.

What that might mean? Here are a few ideas:

Advocate policies that help businesses and individuals adopt truly carbon-reducing technologies, especially those technologies that are available today—solar, electric vehicles, and electric home appliances.
Advocate policies that enable local producers, especially food producers, to be the low-cost providers in their communities.
Advocate policies that support R&D and the development of digitalization, automation, robotics, solar development, battery technology, and similar technologies needed for a post-carbon world.
Advocate policies to make all these new improvements advantageous for the masses.

Ultimately, advocacy needs to lead to a better future for everyone. We can work toward a positive vision and solve climate change at the same time.

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Summary of the Three Part Series

Most well-meaning people want to contribute to climate change solutions, but most of us have been fed a line of bullshit around what actions we can take. We can all do a lot, but it isn’t enough to give it lip-service or to engage in guilt-reducing, yet meaningless acts.

A meaningful program for individual contributions must be individually considered. I encourage you to undertake that consideration. The biggest impacts will be in the following areas:

Evaluate your job and make changes so you can devote an increasing amount of your best energy to climate change solutions.
Electrify your transportation methods, and source it similarly—or use your own physical energy.
Electrify your home or business by swapping out gas appliances with electric ones, and source your electricity with renewables.
Build solar on any buildings you own, assuming it is feasible.
Source your diet as close to home as possible.
Advocate policies that will make these actions more accessible and advantageous for more and more people.

Humanity can win in this challenge, but we need to do it by building a better future and taking actions that make a real difference. We need to do it by staying focused on what works and has a real impact. And we need to do it by bringing everyone on board. We can do this. Let’s start with ourselves, and then help our neighbors do the same. Let’s beat climate change.

In Case You Missed Them

Note: Use the links below to access my current articles published on Medium.com or other platforms.

The Deceits of Retirement Planning

Retirement planning is a great big lie — well, almost.

How Do Police Pull Over a Car with No Driver?

“Ain’t nobody in it!” Guess you can’t win them all

Why Veganism Won’t Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

Diet matters but not the way you think it does

Toward a Laborless Future: 3D Printing Converges with AI

Technologists are working to change our lives

For more of my articles on climate and the postcapitalist future, click here.

You can find my newsletter Intertwine: Living Better in a Worsening World here.

Anthony Signorelli

Ideas, insights, and imagination to help you live better in a worsening world. Topics include Men, #MeToo, and Masculinity; Postcapitalism; Climate Change; Digitalization and Cryptocurrency; Green Energy; Retirement and financial planning… basically everything that addresses making life better in this challenging time of history.

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